FEATURES
How America Overdosed on Drug Courts
Hailed as the most compassionate way to deal with addicts, drug courts were designed to balance punishment with rehab. Instead, they embolden judges to practice medicine without a license—and put lives in danger
By Maia Szalavitz
• Sidebar: What Judges Allow
• Sidebar: Who Goes to Drug Court?
• Sidebar: How Drug Courts Think About Drug Maintenance Treatments
Reform of the Nerds
How a game-show champion named Arthur Chu became the embattled conscience of American male geekdom.
By Peter C. Baker
• Sidebar: The Manosphere by the Numbers
• Sidebar: Gamer Glossary
• Sidebar: Gamers Aren’t Just Another Subculture
The Omniscient Classroom
A former Google executive has cooked up Silicon Valley’s most fully imagined alternative to a standard grade-school education. Now his idea is spreading across the country, one micro-school at a time.
By Kevin Carey
• Sidebar: The Intellectual Father of Personalized Education
Special Section: Thirty Under 30
Our annual list of 30 of the most intriguing researchers—in the fields of economics, political science, social psychology, and more—who are under the age of 30.
By Avital Andrews
• Profile: Noam Angrist
• Profile: Diksha Arora
• Profile: Lydia Brown
• Profile: Colin Carlson
• Profile: Bill Chopik
• Profile: Matt Gaidica
• Profile: Andrew Hall
• Profile: Erin Hartman
• Profile: Christina Henderson
• Profile:Alex Imas
• Profile: Eric Kim
• Profile: Matthew Knepper
• Profile: Maya Krishnan
• Profile: Talila Lewis
• Profile: Jamie Lundine
• Profile: Theodora Mautz
• Profile: Alexander McLean
• Profile: Laura Miller-Graff
• Profile: Timothy Nunan
• Profile: Ed O’Brien
• Profile: Kizzann Ashana Ramsook
• Profile: Daniel Re
• Profile: Margaret Roberts
• Profile: Rachel Robnett
• Profile: Annie Rorem
• Profile: Jesse Sneed
• Profile: Paulina Sosa
• Profile: Carolina Tavarez
• Profile: Iliana Vargas
• Profile: David Wang
PROSPECTOR
Scorched
For Central American migrants, the promise of work in California has dried up.
By Lauren Markham
Tuna Helper
How a fish statistician got famous and changed a country’s mind.
By Bonnie Tsui
Carpe FOMO
Fretting over your options is part of a life well lived.
By Chris Colin
The Signs of Music
A deaf theater company sings out.
By Bettina Chang
ESSAYS
Economics: The Moneyball Trap
Employment markets are getting better at paying everyone what they’re worth.
By Noam Scheiber
Culture: The End of Locker-Room Talk
What a court case involving Wet Ones signals about the future of manhood in the workplace.
By Michael Fitzgerald
BOOKS
Review: Mob Justice
The power of public shaming can hardly be controlled. Can it save the planet?
By Matt Feeney
Review: What Was Famine?
The political economy of mass starvation, and why it is largely a thing of the past.
By Charles C. Mann
- Shelf Help: Too Hot to Handle: A Global History of Sex Education
- Shelf Help: The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy
- Shelf Help: The Twilight of Human Rights Law
DEPARTMENTS
There’s a Name for That
Shifting Baseline Syndrome
The wrong starting point.
Research Gone Wild
Wine by the Pound
There’s no boozing your way to weight loss.
In the Picture
Carrying a Big Stick
India’s Gulabi Gang
Five Studies
Trafficking in Errors
If we want to fight human trafficking, we should start by understanding it.
Subculture
Unschoolers
Leave those kids alone.
Life in the Data
Forever Young
“That’s my boy.”
Quick Studies
The Dubious Value of Certain Diplomas
What’s your degree worth?
Quick Studies
Wanted: Old Musician’s Brain
Musical training early in life may offset the decline in speech processing that comes decades later.
ETC.
- Social Networking
- From the Editor: At the Roots
- Contributors
- Who Funded That?
- Since We Last Spoke: Right of Ways
- Since We Last Spoke: Idiosyncratic Whale Songs
- Since We Last Spoke: Sunblock With Consequences
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